My first order of business would be developing a financial strategy that isn’t dependent on donations. I’d partner with entrepreneurs to create goods and services which benefit the community and provide additional streams of income. I wouldn’t expect the congregation to fund everything.
~Bella
Congratulations, you just reinvented monasticism.
Seriously, monks are required under the monastic rules of Saints Pachomius, Benedict, Columba, Bernard, and Bruno, in a tradition going back to the second* Christian hermit, St. Anthony the Great, to live off of their handiwork. Modern monasteries and convents have various industries that sustain the brothers and sisters. For example, nuns at the Eastern Orthodox convent of St. Barbara manufacture the simple coffins in which most Orthodox Christians like to be buried (the Orthodox shy away from expensive coffins and embalming, and cremation is prohibited except where required by law, for example, Japan). Monks at New Skete Monastery in the eastern US breed German Shepherds. In Belgium and the Netherlands, the monasteries of Rochefort, Westvleteren, Orval, Chimay, Westmalle, LaTrappe, and a few others whose names I cannot recall, brew extremely fine beer.
Rochefort and Westvleteren are especially good. Rochefort’s beer chef (it would be an insult to call him a brewmaster) is Brother Pierre, and he presides over a combined workforce of monks and lay workers (only a few of the monks know the secret recipe, but the ingredients extend far beyond water, barley and hops and include coriander and various exotic spices; Rochefort 10 is 11.2% proof and in terms of cost, flavor, alcohol content and the gourmet market for it, is like a fine wine). Westvleteren is manufactured only by the monks in very limited quantities, with severe restrictions on how many bottles customers can buy, and mandatory reservations to obtain any which must be made months in advance. Westvleteren 12, which is 10% proof (a quadrupel, like Rochefort 10) is widely considered to be the best beer in existence, and given the efforts of the monastery to prevent resale, the beer fetches enormous sums on the grey market.
There was an Anglican monastery, Mount Calvary Monastery, which generated its income solely from functioning as a retreat house. Sadly it closed, as it only had four brethren, one of whom died and another of whom had to retire to a nursing home, but the religious order it is a part of, the Order of the Holy Cross, still has two other monasteries.
Other monastic enterprises involve the production of cheese and other gourmet food, pure beeswax candles, computer repair services, bakeries, wine, liquor, and candy (St. Anthony’s Monastery in Florence, AZ sells Greek Delight, which is similar to Turkish delight except it comes in many flavors, and unlike Turkish Delight, it actually tastes good; they also bake and sell Greek pastries, publish books and have fruit orchards). There is one monastery in the US that operates an expensive Russian restaurant.
Now, there is a reason why monasteries do this and parishes do not: monks live a life of work and prayer, inside the monastery, a consecrated life, and thus have the time to develop all manner of businesses for the good of the community. Now, many presbyters work secular jobs, particularly in the Orthodox Church where most priests don’t make enough money to support a family. Some make less than minimum wage or are volunteers, and a small minority are hieromonks (monastic priests) who only require a small stipend for living expenses; they usually serve mission parishes, parishes which were once large but due to demographic shifts have contracted in size, or parishes whose priest died or retired and a permanent replacement is not available. Interestingly, members of this group often get promoted to Archimandrite, a rank equivalent to the abbot of a monastery, but who are effectively monastic archpriests, and it is from the Archimandrites that most bishops are selected. But the vast majority of Orthodox clergy are married, and some have extremely large families, like Fr. Josiah Trenham, who has ten children.
And the way someone like Fr. Trenham is able to support his family is through the generosity of his parishioners.
Also, Roman Catholic friars (monastics who live in the world but according to a strict rule) usually swear an oath of poverty. Fransiscans, for example, in theory, are forbidden to own personal property and depend on alms to pay for food, et cetera* And friars predominantly serve as priests, as cheaper alternatives to secular priests, who are also paid through donations to the parish and the diocese.
So my point is this: unless you are founding a monastery where people are devoting all of their time and energy to divine services, your church will need to accept donations, at least to cover some of its expenses, even if you have a well paying job and enough money to rent the building and pay for the website, bibles, bulletins, service books, vestments, altar furniture, paraments, musical instruments (hopefully just an organ; the world has too many horrible “worship teams” which are wannabe rockstars; it is also no coincidence that all of the mainline churches except for the Episcopal Church, which has the best musical peogram of any mainline church by far, as well as several other Protestant churches, are headquartered in Nashville, home of the popular music industry, which owns the “contemporary Christian music” industry).
So, even if you have enough money to pay for all that, you still need donations. You don’t need to “pass the plate”**, but you should definitely take donations, if for no other reason than to fund charitable work. To paraphrase the heroic WWII Admiral Kelly Turner, “If you’re not taking donations, you aren’t doing enough.”
*This is a voluntary choice on the part of the friars however. Most Roman Catholic secular clergy (those who are not monks), with the exception of those in most of the Eastern Catholic churches and the Anglican Ordinariate are required to be celibate owing to an ancient rule in the Church of Rome dating back to the fourth century, a rule which was not adopted by any of the other ancient churches (the ancient Roman church was extremely conservative, extremely strict, and as the only Latin speaking church, did things radically differently from all of the other ancient churches; its faith was the same as the other ancient churches until the 9th century, when under the influence of Spanish bishops, the Filioque Controversy erupted and the Roman church began to diverge doctrinally from the Eastern churches; there was an earlier schism with the Assyrian Church of the East and the Oriental Orthodox, but over disagreements which the Roman church resolved with the Assyrians and Oriental Orthodox through ecumenical dialogue in the 1990s.
In practice, only the Capuchins strictly observe the rule, many Capuchins not even wearing shoes but rather the most primitive of sandals; they identify poverty with godliness and intentionally embrace it; conversely some Fransiscan provinces such as that in Herzegovina have wuite a lot of money; the Franciscans in Herzegovina generate a fortune from the alleged Marian apparition at Medjugorje, which the Diocesan Bishops and many experts in the Roman church including retired Pope Benedict XVI, regarded as a complete fabrication of pot-smoking teenagers in 1980, but the Fransiscans in that province are so powerful that they have refused to turn over to the local Dioceses certain parishes they were supposed to have transferred back in the 1890s, as Herzegovina had in the previous years ceased to be a missionary province ruled by the Ottoman Empire and was incorporated into the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
** Some Protestant churches mislabel passing the plate as the “Offertory” when in fact the Offertory is the presentation of the unconsecrated bread and wine, which is taken from the credenza or Table of Preparation in an Eastern Orthodox church, and carried in solemn procession to the altar in preparation for the Lord’s Supper. Some Protestant churches, UMC parishes being among the worst offenders, collect the standard brass collections plates while the organ or piano plays a solemn tune, and then place the collections plates, which are filled with money, which though needed to sustain the church, is also carnal and attracts avarice and greed, the root of all evil, and place them on the altar! I used to think nothing of it until I went to seminary and learned about the historic significance of the Christian altar and the offertory, and now this practice strikes me as unwittingly extremely offensive, and a major goal of mine is to educate my fellow Protestants to not put collection plates on the altar or call the passing of the plates the “offertory.” Episcopalian churches to their credit don’t do this, and I am pretty sure most Lutheran churches also do not do this (while many Presbyterian, Baptist and UCC parishes lack a permanent altar on which to put the plates, but those that do have a tendency to do it).
